One of the distinctions regularly and ruefully claimed by inspectors of mines for the North Wales area in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the worst record for fatal accidents in British coalfields. By 1882 the loss of life had become so alarming that Henry Hall's assistant was sent to live in Chester rather than Liverpool, ‘to enable him to devote more of his time to the North Wales collieries’. Thereafter the situation showed some improvement, partly as a result of more stringent safety regulations, but North Wales continued to be a problem child.

Successive inspectors were puzzled to find a cause and apportion blame for this unfortunate pre-eminence. In the primitive days of the 1850s Joseph Dickinson noted that there were in North Wales ‘some very rough samples of mining’, and with that capacity for understatement which his gentle nature prompted he added that the comparative absence of accidents ‘seems more attributable to the greater care with which the workmen of that part regard their lives than to any superiority of provision for their safety’. An inspector in a neighbouring division was more forthright: ‘The majority of accidents are attributable to the recklessness and neglect of the proprietors and managers of mines.’

Dickinson's successor Higson stressed the need for better education among miners, especially those in positions of responsibility, but as the years went by the emphasis in his reports shifted from concern over the standards of management to something like exasperation with the indifference and fatalistic attitude of the individual miner in the matter of safety.